It’s the start of a new year and so I thought I’d share with you a little approach to getting you started on your goals for this year. It’s an adapted version from one of the chapters from my book The Thought Gym (available on Amazon). The book is about shifting the mindset so you can achieve the things in life you want. That’s because it’s often the things that’s in our way and yet we do everything else but work on the mindset. We join gyms, start a new diet, or make some other behavioural change without addressing what directs the behaviour in the first place.
So here is a short process for you.
1) Reflect on 2015
First, reflect on the year just gone and note down on a piece of paper a few of your successes. I know you’ve had some. Hell, you made it through alive to read this right now for one! It’s important to recognise our successes (and yes, we can learn from our mistakes and misfires too, but right now we want to build on our successes to get us moving in the right direction)
2) List your focus areas
Now list all the areas of your life that you want to make headway in. Career, money, finances, relationships, health, fitness, education, charitable donations of time/money, skill mastery.
3) Write down what your goals are in these areas
Write down anything from 1 – 10 goals for each area that you’ve decided you need to focus on.
4) Decide on your most important goal
Look at all the goals, in all the areas and circle/mark the ONE goal that if you achieved it would make 2016 all worthwhile? I know you want to achieve all of them. And you will. But the truth is, if our focus is split, then we won’t be able to put 100% effort into all of those things. Sometimes you have to knuckle down and just focus on one thing at a time. So pick just one goal to achieve. That’s all.
5) Come up with 4 – 6 actions that you need to take
This could be quite broad to begin with. Maybe it’s as simple as making a phone call, joining a club, signing up for an event. Just get a rough plan together.
6) Do one of those actions in the next 24hrs
Never leave the sight of a goal without doing something towards it’s attainment as soon as possible. That’s because we’ve started to build momentum and we want to keep it going. It’s much harder to start something stationary than move something already in motion.
And that’s it. That will be enough to get you started. Just focus on that one goal for the month of January and focus on taking that first step. Then see what happens.
Like I said, this is a quick and adapted version from my book The Thought Gym which I do encourage you to take a look at – it’s even free on Kindle’s lenders library thing. So no excuses!
What are your strategies for goal setting? Do you set goals at all? Let me know below.
